Anne Rice
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.
Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.Collection: Beauty
One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.Collection: Perspective
None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.Collection: Lestat
There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.Collection: Purpose
Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.Collection: Strong Women
The only power that exists is inside ourselves.Collection: Powerful
Everything we do in life, we do with certain expectations.Collection: Expectations
Sleep is your friend. Dreams are your unwelcome guests.Collection: Dream
Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!Collection: Perfect
If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.Collection: Writing
We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.Collection: Light
Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.Collection: Flower
Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.Collection: Choices
I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning...rather than one great dull answer to all our questionsCollection: Heaven
If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.Collection: Angel
No matter how rudely someone treats you, remain kind. Walking away at peace with yourself is worth it.Collection: Walking Away
I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.Collection: Vampire
Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.Collection: Book
The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.Collection: Sleep
Keep your secrets Keep your silence It is a better gift than truthCollection: Silence
To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.Collection: Grief
Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?... Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?Collection: Mean
The old gods will bring about vengeance not so much because they exist but because I once honored them.Collection: Vengeance
We shall live even in this state of living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy all who would judge and destroy us.Collection: Judging
Let the spirits witness: for theirs is the knowledge of the future - both what it would be, and what I will: You are the Queen of the Damned, that's what you are! Evil is your only destiny. But at your greatest hour, it is I who will defeat you. Look well on my face. It is I who will bring you down.Collection: Queens
Suppose death had a heart to love and to release you, to whom would he turn this passion, would you chose a person from the crowd there. A person to suffer as you suffer.Collection: Passion
We are predators, whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment.Collection: Eye
This is a lyrical guide that addresses the deep human yearning to make a difference. It's full of indelible stories reminding us that, yes, helping people is hard-but it's both possible and infinitely rewarding. A Path Appears offers practical steps that any of us can take to empower others, and ourselves.Collection: Differences
Merciful death. How you love your precious guiltCollection: Vampire
I saw the Light,saw the myriad spirits flying loose up the Tunnel towards the celestial blaze, the Tunnel perfectly round and widening as they rose and for one blessed moment, one blessed tiny instant, the songs of Heaven resounded down the tunnel as if its curves were not made of wind but of something solid that could echo these ethereal songs, and their organized rhythm, their heartbreaking beauty piercing the catastrophic suffering of this place-LestatCollection: Song
A perfect world or a world destroyed, one or the other- someday will come the end of hell.Collection: Perfect
Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.Collection: Passion
You think I live in the past. You don't understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I canCollection: Past
Sometimes dreams show me that my writing should go deeper. Dreams have not so much changed my work as deepened it.Collection: Dream
I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square.Collection: Dropping Acid
And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.Collection: Pain
Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?Collection: Quiet
I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.Collection: Song
I assume I don't need an introduction.Collection: Needs
No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.Collection: Garden
What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.Collection: Mean
I am the Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.Collection: Fire
We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!Collection: Knowing
You make me miserable. You really do, I want you to know that. Much as I love you, much as I need you, much as I can't exist without you, you make me miserable.Collection: Love You
Was it fair to say I didn't know the full state of my soul?Collection: Soul
Who has a right to tell me I have no gift, no talent, no passion ...' he murmured. 'Why do people say those things to you when youre young? Doesn't seem fair, does it?' 'No, darling, it's not fair,'she said. 'But the mystery is why you listen.Collection: Passion